8.02.2006

Talkin' About My G-G-Generation

The Boomers aren't the only ones getting old. Cuban dictador Fidel Castro seems to be full of incipient mortality, to the delight of the Cuban exile community in Miami. The 79-year-old tyrant just underwent intestinal surgery, and has handed off power to his 75-year-old kid brother, Raul. Just temporarily, so they say.

No "get well" message from Washington, of course. The European Union sent a nice one, though:

"We wish that President Fidel Castro and Cuban democracy (have) a quick recovery, that's all we can say," EU spokesman Pietro Petrucci said.

Ouch! For "Cuban democracy" to recover, they need to have Jesus go down there to the tomb and say, "Lazarus, come forth!"

It must be lonely being a communist these days. The Soviet Union is history, as are all of the Iron Curtain dictatorships of the proletariat. China has gone all heretical, and while still autocratic, seems to have embraced capitalist concepts like "trade." Nobody left but the pariahs in North Korea and Cuba, aging devotees of a discredited religion.

And the best successor that the Bearded One can come up with is his 75-year-old brother. Nepotism. Charming. At least we're allowed to elect our own leaders from our leading political families like the Bushes and Kennedys and Clintons, and we're free not to vote for them as well. No such choice in Cuba. The aging Cuban leadership reminds me of nothing so much as the Soviet gerontocracy in the 1980s after Brezhnev died. I think that Lenin's still under glass in Red Square, fifteen years after the Soviet Union crumbled into dust. Maybe Fidel can get a similar mausoleum for himself in Havana. I suspect they'd need a splash shield for it, though, when all those exiles eventually come back and turn it into an open-air urinal.